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"The SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds, that if you came to this world from some other planet, this would be a science fiction world."
- Neal Stephenson
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| Semi-Conducting Graphite-Gel | ||
| Computer brain structured like animal brain. |
In the story, the wheelies are learning robots.
| ...in the actual living animal brain, the whole system of synapses, neurons and connecting fibers was there to start with, and repeated activity would produce useful patterns, but with the wheelies' undifferentiated mass of semi-conducting graphite-gel it was more like the lining up of polarized particles in a magnetic field. |
| Technovelgy from Callahan and the Wheelies,
by Stephen Barr. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1960 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the positronic brain from Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story Reason and the Artificial Brain from Edmond Hamilton's 1926 story The Metal Giants.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Callahan and the Wheelies
More Ideas
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Tech news articles related to Callahan and the Wheelies
Tech news articles related to works by Stephen Barr
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Science Fiction
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
